Back in the 00s, the anti-LGBT culture war targeted primarily gay people, and it primarily used religious arguments. The Bible condemns homosexuality, marriage is a sacred institution, it’s a violation of Christians’ rights to make their churches marry gay people, &c.
Clearly, it didn’t work. During the 10s, when gay marriage was legalized, conservatives were dealt a pretty decisive blow on their anti-gay agenda, and so they shifted from targeting the LGB to targeting the T (they always targeted trans people, of course, but they really ramped it up during the 10s). With this change in focus came a shift in rhetoric. The right-wing certainly does argue for oppressing trans people on religious grounds, but you’re a lot more likely to hear them use scientific-sounding justifications. They’ll talk about chromosomes, about anatomy, about how “biologically there are only two genders,” about “people trying to put their feelings above objective reality.” They’ll throw around words like “rational” and “reason.” This of course ignores all kinds of actual science, such as the degree to which gender is culturally constructed, the existence of intersex people, how gender affirming care is the only dysphoria treatment shown to be effective, and a thousand other things. It’s anti-scientific to its core, but it can fool a casual observer into thinking it’s scientific if it’s telling them what they want to hear. It’s a bigotry for a materialist age, palatable to bazinga brains and nu-atheist Redditors, and maybe it’s just anecdotal, but it seems to me to have more traction among a younger, hipper crowd than the religious arguments ever did.
I can’t help but wonder if this pivot was concocted in some right-wing think tank somewhere.
I can’t help but wonder if this pivot was concocted in some right-wing think tank somewhere.
It literally was. I don’t have the source at hand right now, but not too long ago there was this reveal that the modern anti-trans push with all the scientific-sounding nonsense was concocted by a specific religious group or think tank in the US. Because they were losing the anti-gay culture war, they decided on taking a different approach by focusing on a group that most people know little about: trans people. I also remember reading about how many of those transphobic “LGB” groups in the UK are being funded by religious organizations in the US. It’s all part of their strategy to weaken and divide the LGBT community so that it becomes easier to pick them off one by one. Trans people are only the beginning for them. Any queer person who isn’t trans and thinks they’ll be safe because they aren’t trans, is truly deluding themselves.
This is also how you get people being able to use wedge issue shit like transgender women in sports and “being deeply concerned about protecting children” to allow transphobia to flourish. It sounds like such a good-faith, logical concern rooted in a solid sense of rationality to your average person who knows jack and shit about trans people, so there surely can’t be any harmful rhetoric going on behind that, right!? All this and the “scientific” mumbo jumbo you’re referring to is combined to make trans people look like a fringe bunch of “crazies” who don’t deserve basic human consideration to so-called “normal people.”
This is also how you get people being able to use wedge issue shit like transgender women in sports and “being deeply concerned about protecting children” to allow transphobia to flourish.
I hate those two wedge issues. You couldn’t engineer better ones if you tried. They fucking work, which is the worst part. My (usually pretty decent) mother, who has two trans children who she loves, started trying to talk to me several months ago about how there might be fairness issues with trans women in sports. It was so hard to maintain my composure and argue her away from that deeply shitty “worry” rather than just yell at her and tell her to never bring it up again, which is what I wanted to do. But, of course, we look like we’re overreacting and, yes, crazy, if we say “that’s a bullshit unreal worry, never say anything like that in my presence again”. It is a bullshit unreal worry, but it sounds just reasonable enough to clueless cis people that we can’t dismiss it out of hand. I fucking hate it so, so much.
And, of course, the “worries” around childhood transition perform the same function! Luckily no one in my life is susceptible to that one, but I know a lot of people are. And again here you can’t just say “childhood transition is great, shut the fuck up”. That’s the truth, but it doesn’t sound like the truth to your average cis person.
I feel like the childhood transition stuff is a sidestep, a deflection. Toddlers are poking around touchscreen computers before they can talk, that seems like a much more pressing “think of the children” moment. Not that I expect any nation in the english-speaking world to handle that with any sort of thoughtful or measured approach…
And again here you can’t just say “childhood transition is great, shut the fuck up”.
I just point out they’re OK with childhood transition for cis kids. That sometimes works on liberals at least.
A lot of this rhetoric only ever works when people have never encountered nor will ever encounter a trans person. Trans people aren’t real to a lot of Americans. There’s very little visibility or understanding. You ask a person to name someone trans and the only name they’ll have is maybe Caitlyn Jenner. They might know Lia Thompson or Chelsea Manning if they’re slightly more tuned in.
But most Americans still haven’t encountered trans people in their daily lives, it’s a pure abstract concept. It’s all imaginary mind palace games, so of course it’s gonna get couched in pseudoscience terms.
The average American probably can’t describe the difference between a drag queen and a trans woman, by the way. It’s all considered the same thing. I’m personally a non-binary agender person who prefers she/they pronouns while also preferring to present masculine, so imagine how they’d interpret any of that.
If establishment liberals had any political instincts whatsoever, they’d be countering this pivot with something like, "The right talks big about freedoms, but dumps you the second you stop conforming. Rhetorically, you can counter both anti-trans sentiment and dovetail into pro-choice abortion rights with this approach… instead, they’ve decided on neoconservative war-hawking. Yay.
I once shut down a lobby of angry, hateful gamers with “The most important freedom, for your typical yankee, is the freedom to tell people they’re doing freedom wrong”
Class society needs a self-justifying ideology. Christianism wasn’t working so well at reinforcing the patriarchy, so it adapted it into “rationalism” (a less obvious form of Christianism).
“rationalism” (a less obvious form of Christianism)
Can you elaborate on this?
Only a little because it’s an underdeveloped thought of mine. But you know Richard Dawkins? Self-proclaimed atheist? Yet he gave the game away like a year ago when he used creationist talking points (saying the human body was made to do such and such) during one his anti-trans tirades. He also literally calls himself a cultural Christian.
the “rational, enlightened” nature of modernity is a smokescreen for a set of intense contradictions. as materialists it’s obvious to us that christianity didn’t just disappear overnight with the advent of capitalism. “scientific” capitalist modernity is rife with undercurrents of christian spirituality which are obscured and occultised compared to older times but still ever-present.
this is a good read on it, i know more esoteric marxism isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but even if you don’t personally give a shit about spirituality i think this piece is well-written and goes over some of the contradictions quite well between the “rational, scientific” modern age and its true more sinister nature. https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2021/11/25/dark-eucharist-of-the-real-god/
I don’t think its necessarily Christianity but Western ideology at this point…
agree with this. it should be obvious to us materialists that christianity didn’t just go away overnight, it’s ingrained in the culture for millenia and undercurrents of it still exist in modern, “rationalist” capitalism, although occultised and obscured.
Yes, but also I wouldn’t give Christianity too much credit. Patriarchal family structures and class society is upheld by Confucianist ideology in East Asia. Both are justifications for the same kind of hierarchical regime, although they of course have their own particularities.
